Tiger Woods, like he has been so many times in the last 15 months away from the PGA Tour, was alone on Friday. His playing partner in the Hero World Challenge—Tiger’s event in many respects, from his hosting, his foundation’s sponsorship, and his first event since last August—withdrew before the second round, leaving the refurbished legend by himself to walk the grounds of the Albany championship course. Had this been Albany, New York, it’d have been symbolic of the latter, tattered years of his career: an aging superstar strolling solo in the cold. But this Albany is in the Bahamas—not a bad place for him to warm up.
The tournament, which includes 18 of the world’s top professionals, has been described as Woods’s return to “competitive golf”. He legitimized the “competitive” part on Friday. He birdied seven holes and shot par on the other 11 to fire a round of 65, the third-best of the day among all participants. He displayed two of the components that once made his game indomitable: his precision in leaving himself easy opportunities to score low, and his resiliency in not coughing up strokes. At the par-four 16th hole, after he had made all of his birdies for the day, Woods faced a 30-foot par putt that bent right-to-left and turned sharply at the end. He struck it just about perfectly, leaving the ball ever so slightly on the high side of the cup but judging the speed well enough for it to fall in. He sprang toward the hole in pursuit, tucked his lower lip underneath his teeth, and extended a clenched fist. “This was big, to not drop a shot, not lose any momentum. That was a big one,” Woods said after the round. In his heyday, Tiger Woods won prolifically because he wouldn’t give victory away. On Friday, he bogeyed zero holes.
For someone who may need guile and wisdom to hang with a new generation of talent more than a decade his junior, Woods has looked noticeably younger this week than he did even five years ago. He hasn’t taken a vacation from the game, exactly—he committed to an arduous comeback after two back surgeries in 2015—and he doesn’t consider his time in the Bahamas a getaway. “I’m entered in an event. I’m going to try to win this thing,” he said before the tourney began on Tuesday. Rather, Tiger appears slender and peaceful, relative to the muscular and intense figure he cut in 2008, the last year he won a major championship. He lamented losing weight two years ago ahead of this very same event, although advisers and professionals, like his former coach Hank Haney, have said a skinnier frame is better for Woods’s longevity. “My opinion is he did too much of … the gym stuff,” Haney said in 2014. “When he was thinner and younger he was actually faster then. The strength maybe helps you get out of the rough, but I’d agree that he’s overdone it.”
With a better game than the one he frequently showed amid his saga of stress and injuries the last eight years, he might need to hack it out of the jungle less often. But when he needs to, he’s now fit enough to make it to the 16th green and lean on his putter to support his score and not his gait.
